Corey White making a mark in comedy with stand-up act based on his childhood

Up and coming Australian comedian Corey White is making a mark at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with his 'seriously funny' stand-up act that is based on his brutal childhood. He spoke with Australian Story producer Kristine Taylor.

Despite my bleak humour, I'm getting good reviews and now my people are swarming in.

Corey White

Earlier this month, a UK Guardian review of this year's line-up for the world's biggest comedy festival noted that newcomer Corey White was not the first comedian to turn up with a hard-luck autobiographical story.

But all of them put together couldn't add up to "the misery mountain" of this "staggeringly positive and highly skilled comic".

He is performing the same "unflinchingly funny and life-affirming" act that won him the Best Newcomer Award at this year's Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Everyone was telling me that Corey's show was a must-see. And he just killed it. He wasn't talking about an ad he'd seen, or a billboard, the same stuff that everyone else was talking about. He was talking about this horrific childhood and spinning it into really funny lines. It was captivating.

I think that people want to laugh at the really terrible things that befall everybody. That's the stuff people are too scared to talk about, and if you can cast a light on that, that's when the monkey brain loses itself to laughter.

Corey White

In tonight's Australian Story, Corey White illuminates the underbelly of a dark family saga and the desolation of foster care that gives rise to his gags about growing up with a "hustling, heroin addict mother and a violent, jack-of-all-crimes, all round s*** bloke" father.

I guess my family life was probably one of the worst environments a child could be born into and raised in. We would all go in and out of foster care as mum went in and out of jail. My dad was in and out of jail as well.

Corey White

Fellow comedian Damien Power said when he heard about his friend's upbringing, he would "often look at Corey and go 'how are you this intellectual, well read, poetic kind of guy? How the f*** are you not on the streets, a criminal?".

White said when he was young he retreated into a fantasy world of reading, writing and playing chess.

His good grades were noted by a child safety case worker who facilitated an equity bursary for his final two years of high school at Nudgee College, one of Brisbane leading boys' boarding schools.

His former teacher, James Robinson, reflected that it "must have been tough for Corey, coming in as an outsider" but that he had a "great sense of humour, even back then".

I saw Nudgee as my one shot at getting into university, of lifting myself out of my family's history.

Corey White

White went on to study IT at the University of Queensland and topped his first year before "things from my childhood started bubbling up" and he experienced his first bout of serious depression.

He dropped out of uni and began to experiment with his sexuality and drug addiction, before spiralling into a full-blown ice addiction.

Then a friend took him to an open mic comedy night "and I fell in love with it. I thought it was the most wonderful thing in the whole world. You could talk about whatever you wanted to talk about, what was bothering you, what was annoying you, what you found funny, what you found beautiful, and you could make people laugh, and that was so joyous to me. And I became addicted to comedy, because I'm very good at being addicted to things."

White said turning his horror early life into stand-up has been his salvation.

After an almost 10-month drought and a steady flow of crises, Australia has a cleansing Test win in Perth. For Tim Paine and his team, it could be the start of the journey back into the hearts of the nation.